Weekly Recap - July 24th, 2010

Intro/Random:
Why does Google Ad Words keep suggesting a cell phone snoop to track my two-timing husband? Is it accusing *me* of something, or does it think I'm secretly gay-married to a philanderer?

Mostly not sorry I skipped Comicon this year. Sorry not to be seeing friends, but I think the money savings, and not having to fight the crowds, more than makes up for it.

My Tuesday: Starting to feel the Comicon blues, bummed that my shop didn't jump on the Scott Pilgrim midnight release thing, and my Transformers XBox game won't be here until tomorrow. On the other hand, Texas found my last paycheck from ACC and wants to send me close to $700 in free money. So... on balance? Not a bad day.

Comics I Read This Week:
GI Joe A Real American Hero #156 - Not a fan of the Jugglers or Billy and the ninjas, which dominated too much of the latter half of Hama's run. And COBRA becoming a "Blackwater" type organization is kinda goofy. That said, if you can roll with it, and I can, because I loved Hama's GI Joe, it's a fun return to form for Hama, and the artwork is surprisingly good.

Graphic Novels I Read This Week:
Just Scott Pilgrim Volume 6, actually. Which I thought was really good, maybe not quite great. Volume 4 remains my favorite volume of the series. But the series as a whole is definitely great.

Comics Retailing Thought of The Week:
Talking comics retail with Brandon from Austin Books, Eric from Tribe and the LEOG guys... this was a lot of fun to record, hopefully it's fun to listen to.

Comics News:
Modern Comic covers re-imagined in the Silver Age by Chris Sims. Awesome.

So far, this is my favorite news out of San Diego.

TV/Movies:
Inception was amazing, one of my favorite movies in years. Also gave up some sleep to catch REC 2, and it was also fantastic, better than the first (which I loved.)

Speaking of Inception, Udon Studios has done a pretty decent prequel comic. Which I recommend reading after you've seen the movie.

And this Roger Ebert piece springboards off Inception, but it's mostly about the craft of reviewing and the reactions to it. He also raises the question of whether any movie is universally loved, and a commenter suggests Casablanca. So... anybody out there dislike Casablanca? Because I think that commenter is probably right.

Games:
Started playing Transformers: War for Cybertron this week. It's good, and lots of fun doing the transformations. Love that you can play the whole game as a 3-person co-op. However... the boss battles are frustratingly hard. Not enough to ruin the game, but enough to be annoying.

Rock Band 3 playlist is shaping up nicely